Productivity and organization are powerful tools, but there aren’t really any readily made applications to help you with them. If you want to create a log of your activities, what do you do? Task managers only enable you to track your to-do’s, what if you decide to do something else, will you create a to do list after the fact? It’s feasible, but not too practical. You can use applications like OneNote and Evernote, but personally neither are ideal for me. OneNote is too freeform for me, I get carried away in the details, and it’s also not the best for creating a searchable database. With Evernote I just feel that my stuff is all over the place. Also, I would especially love to keep my database online, which neither application can accomplish. To get around this problem, I just came up with a logging system that enables you to log any even in any way you want.
This tool is known as Wordpress. Yep, I am using a blog to track what I do. It’s quite simple really, basically I just installed a blog on one of my domain names (you can use a free Wordpress.com account as well, or any other blog) and each entry I write is a log. I then access the blog via RSS to give me all the info on my blog in a neat, concise way.This form gives you numerous advantages, here are some I use myself, but with the right plugins you can do anything.
How I add notes
I just create a new post to add log entries and I give it a very simple structure. The title contains as much info as possible in one line, the better titles you write the more info at a glance you can derive from your RSS feed later. The second part is a short summary of the item. I add a horizontal rule in the html code after that “<hr>” and write the long description (or paste the email) after the rule. If you don’t have this much info you can just leave out the rule and the long description of course.
Alternatively, you can also use the “<!–more–>” quicktag to cut off your post after the short description. This has its advantages, you will only see the short description in the RSS feed, but on the downside, you will have to click to another page in order to see the details. I am going with the first method at the moment by the way. If you want some added visibility, bold the short description and it will show well in the feed.
That’s all there really is to it, apart from adding categories and tags explained below. It takes about 10 seconds to write a short entry and about 30 to write a long one. This means that this method will take up 30 minutes of my day at most, but the benefits of productivity and really good organization, along with great search capabilities make this well worth the time.
Tags & Categories
Tags and categories give you endless options in organizing your log. Initially I am starting out by only using categories. I am using two sets, one is for assigning real categories like “Email” or “New feature” and so on, and the other is for the state of the log entry. This can be “done” or “follow up” or “waiting”, etc.
A crafty plugin I found that helps here is the Fun with categories plugin. It enables you to filter posts according to two categories at once. This plays into our hands nicely, as I can narrow it down to all emails waiting for follow up. Productivity is on its way with this plugin, but it also helps if you try to think of your category structure before hand, not just make it up as you go along.
Comments
Commenting is a great way to collaborate on specific items with a team or with friends. Wordpress essentially has built into it the structure for all those task management sites with a payment option. Lots of plugins exist to enhance comments, but even in its original state it will be great.
You can also use it yourself, to indicate any changes. You can create an entry as a task, and if you completed it in a different way you can indicate that in the comments, instead of changing the original post. This has two benefits, one is that you will see the originals of everything, the other is that you will see the exact dates because the original post will retain the posting date, while the comment will get a new date.
Plugins
I don’t really want to go into this now, let’s leave that for another post, but needless to say that the productivity you can achieve with addins for Wordpress is awesome. You can put a calendar on your blog and integrate it with Google Calendar, you can put Widgets to keep track of yourself, in other words, you can create the ultimate personal information manager, organization and productivity system, just with a simple blog. Take a look at the Wodpress plugins page if you need anything, and make sure to comment if you have anything to say (and Digg if you liked it).
Original post here: Daniel
13 March 2008
| Blog, Organization, Productivity, online apps, wordpress
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